Victor Magariños D.: Works on Paper from the 1950s to the 1990s
‘We are on the threshold of a new era – the cosmological era. The duty of today’s artist is to provide testimony for this, as primitive man did in the caves of Altamira. This is the challenge of our time.’
Victor Magariños D.
Cecilia Brunson Projects is excited to announce an exhibition of works on paper by Argentine artist Victor Magariños D. (1924–1993). This is the first exhibition of his work to take place in Europe since the artist’s death, and coincides with the announcement of the representation of the artist’s estate by Cecilia Brunson Projects.
Magariños D. represents an elusive and under-recognized chapter in the history of Latin American 20th century art, in part because of his highly reclusive artistic practice, as well as his unique set of interests and beliefs about art and abstraction. His career-long insistence that art is a parallel manifestation of theoretical science puts him alongside Georges Vantongerloo (an artist he recognized as a mentor), as well as other international figures of art history who imbued abstract form with cosmological meaning, such as Hilma af Klimt, Josef Albers, or Wassily Kandinsky.
For Magariños D., the manifestation of Relativity, from theory into reality spanning Hiroshima and the Apollo landings, became a defining artistic force, something to channel directly into the points, lines and planes of his abstract practice. He referred to his studio as his workshop, and his works range from intensely detailed fibre-tip drawings on scraps of paper, to acrylic on canvas to large plexiglass sculptures. All of these works propose form as a conduit to the emerging realities of post-war existence, where quantum mechanics informs artistic representation.
In concentrating on Magariños D.’s works on paper, Cecilia Brunson Projects is highlighting the artist’s most essential and exploratory output across the breadth of his forty-year long career. Magariños D.’s paper surfaces become a universe of changing phases: harmony and discord; vibration and stasis; nucleus and orbit; curvature and line. The selected works include his delicate abstractions in tempera painted on early artistic manifestos from the 1950s, to symbolic and ‘channeled’ cosmological expressions in fibre-tip, graphite, ink and vinyl glue.
These expressive forms on paper appear and reappear across a career that defies a linear chronological sequence but emerges as an ebb and flow of recurrent symbols and ideas – reflecting the finite/infinite paradox that grounds his work as a whole.
